•Geographically explicit ecological momentary assessment was conducted with residents of Ile de France.•Individuals’ momentary mental well-being was associated to micro-urban spaces along the daily ...mobility paths.•Momentary mental well-being improved after exposure over the previous two hours to walkable areas or water elements, commerce, leisure and cultural attractors.•Relationships were stronger when exposures were defined based only on outdoor location points rather than all location points.
The urban environment plays an important role for the mental health of residents. Researchers mainly focus on residential neighbourhoods as exposure context, leaving aside the effects of non-residential environments. In order to consider the daily experience of urban spaces, a people-based approach focused on mobility paths is needed. Applying this approach, (1) this study investigated whether individuals’ momentary mental well-being is related to the exposure to micro-urban spaces along the daily mobility paths within the two previous hours; (2) it explored whether these associations differ when environmental exposures are defined considering all location points or only outdoor location points; and (3) it examined the associations between the types of activity and mobility and momentary depressive symptomatology. Using a geographically-explicit ecological momentary assessment approach (GEMA), momentary depressive symptomatology of 216 older adults living in the Ile-de-France region was assessed using smartphone surveys, while participants were tracked with a GPS receiver and an accelerometer for seven days. Exposure to multiple elements of the streetscape was computed within a street network buffer of 25 m of each GPS point over the two hours prior to the questionnaire. Mobility and activity type were documented from a GPS-based mobility survey. We estimated Bayesian generalized mixed effect models with random effects at the individual and day levels and took into account time autocorrelation. We also estimated fixed effects. A better momentary mental wellbeing was observed when residents performed leisure activities or were involved in active mobility and when they were exposed to walkable areas (pedestrian dedicated paths, open spaces, parks and green areas), water elements, and commerce, leisure and cultural attractors over the previous two hours. These relationships were stronger when exposures were defined based only on outdoor location points rather than all location points, and when we considered within-individual differences compared to between-individual differences.
Abstract
The article focuses on the importance of using the developments of aesthetics as a theoretical framework for applied urban research. The need for this is prompted by the internal logic of ...the process of “global aestheticization” now taking place in the field of the humanities. According to a number of reputable scientists (in particular, one of the most famous modern German philosophers Wolfang Welsch), in the context of the revision of the usual forms of experience and the spread of virtual communication practices, aesthetics has the potential to become a kind of a synthetic science, interpreting the rapidly spreading “derealization of “reality”. At the same time, it is obvious that aesthetics can no longer remain within the narrow framework of philosophical discourse, but is called upon to go beyond it into the realm of existence and conduct a comprehensive analysis of specific manifestations of the sociocultural life of a modern person, in particular, heterogeneous urban processes, “poetics of the urban environment.”
Salinization of inland fresh surface waters in temperate climates is a growing concern due to increasing salt inputs from sources including chloride (Cl)-containing road salt de-icers, industrial ...waste, and landfill leachate. Groundwater pathways play an important role in the year-round delivery of Cl to streams, but quantifying this pathway, including spatiotemporal variability and amount of Cl mass stored in the subsurface, is challenging. The objective of this study was to demonstrate, evaluate, and compare the potential applications of the geoelectrical techniques – electromagnetics (EM) and direct current (DC) resistivity – for mapping salt contamination in shallow urban groundwater and characterizing the groundwater pathways delivering Cl to urban streams. EM and DC surveys were conducted (3D mapping and 2D time-lapse) across a 20 m salt-impacted stream section and surrounding riparian zone that is located near an arterial road and parking lot. Groundwater samples and soil cores were also collected to validate the geoelectrical results. Both the EM and DC surveys detected high salt concentrations in the shallow subsurface (up to 3 m depth) near the road, parking lot, and stream; however, DC more accurately represented groundwater Cl concentrations. DC results were used to calculate the total Cl mass in the subsurface, with the spatial mass distribution used to infer the temporal variability in the subsurface salt plume. Finally, time-lapse DC showed that the highest groundwater salt concentrations existed near the stream between June and October – this is expected to contribute to the elevated salt concentrations in the stream during summer months. This study has shown that EM and DC can be useful for identifying groundwater salt concentration, storage, and transport in a non-intrusive and efficient manner, making them valuable field tools for characterizing and quantifying groundwater salt pathways to urban streams.
Display omitted
•Electromagnetics (EM) and direct current (DC) resistivity efficient for mapping road salt plumes.•EM provides faster imaging for initial identification of road salt-contaminated sites.•DC imaging provides higher resolving ability to estimate subsurface salt storage.•Time-lapse DC shows persistence of groundwater salt plume discharging to a stream.
Elevated concentration of atmospheric aerosols during severe urban air pollution episodes necessitates a deep understanding of the underlying determinants for a sustainable urban environment. The ...15-year (2001–2015) Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aerosol optical depth (AOD) data for the Phoenix and Los Angeles Metropolitan Areas were applied to examine the spatio-temporal patterns and dynamics of urban aerosols. The strongly correlated temporal trends of AOD were observed due to the similar seasonal pattern of aerosol emissions and potential synoptic connections between two areas. Relatively higher mean value and lower decreasing trend of AOD were found in the PMA. Correlations reveal that topography is the predominant factor affecting the spatial pattern of AOD, as compared to the urban land use and vegetation. The effect of urbanization on air pollution varies with preexisting landscape, which apparently alleviates aerosol concentration in the PMA. Vegetation mitigates air pollution despite its emission of fine mode aerosols. As a cross-validation, the ground-measured concentrations of particulate matters (PM2.5 and PM10) were compared against AOD. The abnormal weak positive or strong negative AOD–PM2.5 associations result from the relatively small portion of anthropogenic aerosols and the changing atmospheric boundary layer height.
Display omitted
•Decreasing trends of aerosol optical depth (AOD) were found in both metropolitans.•Mean AOD value in 2001–2015 is relatively higher in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area.•Topography predominates the spatial pattern of AOD.•The effect of urbanization on AOD varies with different urban settings.•The overall effect of vegetation is to alleviate AOD.
Marieholmstunnel Christiansen, Susanne; Schou-Bojesen, Thomas; Kasper, Thomas ...
Tunnelling and underground space technology,
April 2022, 2022-04-00, 20220401, Letnik:
122
Journal Article
Recenzirano
•Immersed tunnel in Gothenburg, Sweden, with three 102 m long elements.•Urban construction with limited space, difficult transport logistics, ship traffic.•Soil conditions with 60–100 m of soft clay ...layer, difficult deep excavations.•Construction pit with steel tubes, underwater excavation and underwater bottom slab.•Tunnel elements temporarily supported on steel piles while being sandflowed.
The Marieholm tunnel is a part of the Marieholm Connection Project, which connects the Port of Gothenburg and the Industries at Hisingen with the central part of Gothenburg. The closed section is 500 m long with three traffic lanes in each direction. This paper presents some of the main decisions and challenges, which shaped the construction of the Marieholm project. The challenge of the project was construction in the city with limited space and difficult transport logistics together with ongoing ship traffic. Both up and down stream an existing tunnel and bridges limited transportation width and depth. Soil conditions with 60–100 m of soft (Gothenburg) clay layer made deep excavations difficult. The immersed tunnel was constructed as three 102 m long elements constructed one after the other in a dry dock within the alignment. The construction pit was built with steel tubes as retaining walls, underwater excavation and a bottom slab cast underwater. During construction wall deflection, bottom heave and strut forces were closely monitored. The tunnel elements were temporarily supported on steel piles while being sandflowed.
Temperature is associated with mortality risk across cities. However, there is lack of study investigating the summer effect on mortality associated with mental/behavioral disorders, especially in ...cities with subtropical climate. In addition, summer mortality in subtropical cities is different from tropical cities, and previous studies have not investigated the urban environmental inequality on heat mortality associated with mental/behavioral disorders. A register-based study was developed to estimate the temperature effects on decedents on days with 50
th
percentile of average daily temperature between 2007 and 2014 in Hong Kong (
n
= 133,359). Poisson regression was firstly applied to estimate the incidence rate ratio (IRR) from the summer temperature effects on all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, respiratory mortality, and mortality associated with mental/behavioral disorders. For a 1 °C increase in average temperature on days with temperature ≥ 24.51 °C, IRRs of mortality associated with mental and behavioral disorders on lag 0 and lag 1 days were 1.033 1.004, 1.062 and 1.030 1.002, 1.060, while temperature effects on cardiovascular mortality and respiratory mortality during normal summer days (not extreme heat events) were not significant. A further investigation with linear regression has shown that decedents with mental/behavioral disorders on higher temperature days resided in areas with lower percentage of sky view, lower percentage of vegetation cover, higher level of neighborhood-level PM
2.5
, higher level of neighborhood-level NO, and higher level of neighborhood-level black carbon (BC). In order to develop protocols for community healthcare based on the “Leaving no one behind” scheme documented in the 2016 Sustainable Development Goals report of the United Nations, it is necessary to include heat effects on mental/behavioral disorders, especially people with dementia, for community planning and healthcare development.
Urban evapotranspiration (ET) is one of the most important components of water and energy balance, and carbon cycle in urbans. It is also a natural process that is powerful enough to possibly ...mitigate the negative effects caused by urbanization and global warming. Increasing or regulating urban ET could possibly be a solution to overcome the negative impacts caused by urbanization and global warming. Since 2000, researches on urban ET have been increasing and significant progresses have been achieved. A review of these progresses will certainly further promote the related researches and social practices, however, there is yet no such a review article available. Therefore, this article reviewed almost all the published papers on urban ET over the world, summarized its current progresses, scientific understandings, and forecasted the possible challenges in the future. Results achieved from this review would be helpful to use the power of ET to improve the livability of cities, guide the practices of sponge city construction and low impact development, mitigate the negative effect of urban heat island, and reduce urban carbon emission.
•Clustering of hydrochemical data of urban groundwater in Seoul was performed.•The combined use of SOM and FCM was useful to interpret urban groundwater quality.•Three hydrochemical groups and their ...distributions were identified.•Leakage of sewage wastewater is a major cause of groundwater contamination.•Local denitrification is observed around underground facilities with pumping.
To make an overall assessment of the groundwater quality in Seoul city, we used the self-organizing map (SOM) technique in combination with fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering. SOM visualizes complicate and multidimensional data structures on a 2D surface while the FCM algorithm creates overlapping cluster boundaries among samples that are continuously distributed over a data space. The combination of SOM and FCM clustering was expected to help characterize highly complicated urban groundwater quality. As a result, the SOM characterized 343 groundwater samples using 91 neurons, which were further classified by FCM clustering into three water groups. Group 1 addressed the least polluted groundwater (17% of the samples (n = 58), average TDS = 194.5 mg/L and NO3 = 6.9 mg/L) and occurred in the peripheral areas whose land cover is mainly occupied by forests. Increasing pH with increasing sodium and bicarbonate concentrations indicated that the hydrogeochemistry of Group 1 was largely controlled by water-rock interactions. Group 2 included the highly polluted groundwater (24% of the samples (n = 82), average TDS = 326.2 mg/L and NO3 = 42.6 mg/L), and sporadically occurred in Seoul, with no distinct spatial control. This group seemed to be affected by sewage from broken sewer pipes, which are a primary pollution source of Seoul groundwater and are ubiquitously distributed beneath the city. Group 3 water also represented the highly contaminated groundwater (30% of the samples (n = 103), average TDS = 527.1 mg/L), but contained low nitrate concentrations (average NO3 = 13.1 mg/L). Based on their spatial locations, intensive groundwater pumping from subway tunnels and other underground spaces at the city center seemed to drive the induced flow of organic contaminants, resulting in local reducing conditions sufficient for denitrification. The remaining 100 samples (29% of the samples) shared the hydrogeochemical properties of two or three groups. This study successfully characterized the spatial pattern of urban groundwater quality that is complicated by various contamination sources and hydrogeochemical processes. The combined use of SOM and FCM clustering was proven as a powerful tool to interpret nonlinear and highly heterogeneous environmental data for which it is difficult to define cluster boundaries. Taken together, our results contribute to a better management of urban groundwater in metropolitan cities under high risks of anthropogenic contamination.
Cities in the developing world are expanding rapidly, and undergoing changes to their roads, buildings, vegetation, and other land use characteristics. Timely data are needed to ensure that urban ...change enhances health, wellbeing and sustainability. We present and evaluate a novel unsupervised deep clustering method to classify and characterise the complex and multidimensional built and natural environments of cities into interpretable clusters using high-resolution satellite images. We applied our approach to a high-resolution (0.3 m/pixel) satellite image of Accra, Ghana, one of the fastest growing cities in sub-Saharan Africa, and contextualised the results with demographic and environmental data that were not used for clustering. We show that clusters obtained solely from images capture distinct interpretable phenotypes of the urban natural (vegetation and water) and built (building count, size, density, and orientation; length and arrangement of roads) environment, and population, either as a unique defining characteristic (e.g., bodies of water or dense vegetation) or in combination (e.g., buildings surrounded by vegetation or sparsely populated areas intermixed with roads). Clusters that were based on a single defining characteristic were robust to the spatial scale of analysis and the choice of cluster number, whereas those based on a combination of characteristics changed based on scale and number of clusters. The results demonstrate that satellite data and unsupervised deep learning provide a cost-effective, interpretable and scalable approach for real-time tracking of sustainable urban development, especially where traditional environmental and demographic data are limited and infrequent.
Display omitted
•Urban built and natural environments have multiple interrelated features.•Unsupervised deep learning applied to satellite images identified distinct environmental clusters.•Some clusters had dominant features like water, vegetation, and dense building and population.•Other clusters had multiple features like buildings surrounded by vegetation.•Our method can track urban change and support sustainable urban development.
PDF
